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First Look: Designer Tea House
First Look: Designer Teahouse （寮间速递：设计师茶屋）is a discussion following the First Look: Planner Face-to-Face project where a game designer discusses a specific topic, which could be something they're currently working on. You can say that it's the beginning of the seventh First Look. The website is located at: http://yys.16163.com/zt/yys/hd/ljsd07/ First Topic: Skill Standardization The first edition was released around 2018.07.11. The writer is the Onmyoji planner FN. In Onmyoji, for the sake of showing the individuality and uniqueness of each shikigami, the creation, skill design, and code are all done separately from other shikigami. This meant a lack of uniformity that would fit all shikigami, and over time problems became apparent. The most representative of this would be the description of skills, the current interface's display method cannot properly convey the complexity of the skill, causing challenges in interpretation; Next would be the impreciseness of terms, where the same mechanism could go by multiple names; More, the rules of skill interactions are chaotic, although we'd fix them after receiving feedback, but since we could not address them all, sometimes we gave players the impression that we weren't fixing problems and they would even become unsure of if there truly was a problem and the skill was working as expected. They would mistakenly think that our actions were just whimsically adjusting shikigami according to our tastes and using fixes as an excuse. This is not a situation we want to see. Thus, to completely address this issue, skill standardization became a pressing matter. We've specially reviewed all shikigami and their skills, set down some axioms, and plan to implement them in multiple ways: skill descriptions, usage of terms, and skill effect rules. Skill Descriptions There exist significant problems in current skill descriptions. The first thing that needs to be fixed would be the readability. When a new shikigami is released and you read their skills, it is possible to reread the descriptions several times and still not understand what exactly they do. Under the condition of not changing the original skill's effect, we've designed a new method of describing skills. 185149p2zfud5uhfp0u2m0.jpg|Current skill 185152ejs00o5m81thls25.jpg|Proposed revision In the original block of text, situational phrases, function of skill, status effects, etc. all are combined. Of course, there are also some uncommon terms, making reading a taxing experience. Following the new method, the effect of the skill is maintained, the situational phrase is split away from the skill descripion; status-related portions are moved to become the details; the skill description only has the most important part, which is the main skill's function. Usage of Terms Skill descriptions and terminology are complementary. The former lessens the strain on comprehension, and the latter clarifies the skill. Often, even though it's understandable, there would still be questions as some details cannot be deduced from the description at all, and require dalao to be like analysts to slowly obtain results from practical use. Once we set down standardized terms, we hope that everyone only need to look at the keywords to straightforwardly understand what exactly the function is. Some examples would be: ;If chances are affected by accuracy :Using standardized terms, we will distinguish "base chance" and "chance." When we use base chance, that means it can be built up and is affected by status accuracy. For example, Shishio's description of 50% base chance would mean that the accuracy stat will be useful. ;If statuses can ignore shields :This is actually a trivial question. In reality the problem is with not standardizing terms. When we use "sustaining damage" and "attacking," players will clearly see that "attacking" has an effect regardless of whether enemy sustains damage or not, while "sustaining damage" requires the enemy to actually receive damage to take effect. So, with the exception of writing the description wrong, there is no need to guess for this case. Two examples were listed, but the terms that need standardization far exceed simply two. Just like in translation: faithfulness, expressiveness, and elegance are needed. Faithfulness refers to when everyone reads the skill description, and there are no inaccuracies or incompleteness. Expressiveness means that under the condition of accuracy and with no burden on comprehension, the optimization of the layout and the simplification of needless words. Lastly, elegance is that after taking the previous two into account, making sure that the display of the shikigami's personality from the skill's design is not out-of-character. Rules for Skills' Effects This is the most difficult to do and the most taxing, and so has been relegated to last. Due to the complexity of the code of shikigami skills, skills' functions will appear to be different from time to time. For example, Ichimoku Ren's single shield break damage's interaction with other shikigami's passives and mitama effects is not always uniform, so it will trigger some effects and not others; Inugami's countering from passive will stop due to some control effects; some passives of shikigami will also lose effect despite not being controlled. Cases like these are not what we want to see, so we wish to deal with the chaos in one fell swoop. This may mean skills adjustments, causing some shikigami to be strengthened or weakened (like Kamaitachi). We will continue to observe the effects of these adjustments, so that at the same time as helping onmyoji-sama to improve, we won't impact the feelings that players hold for these shikigami. References